[iwar] Saddam pics and Orwell's Room 101

  
A media victory
 
By Rogel Alpher , Haaretz
 
 
 
He deserves it. Morally, there are plenty of justifications for
humiliating Saddam Hussein a bit in front of the world. He is a
psychopathic mass murderer. But the American media treatment of his
capture is an Orwellian nightmare for the following reasons:
 
 
 
 
l The main reason America went to war in Iraq was the claim that
Saddam Hussein was manufacturing and in possession of weapons of mass
destruction that he refuses to expose to international inspectors and
which he refuses to dismantle. America claimed that if he exposed and
destroyed those weapons, Iraq would not be attacked. It presented
apparent evidence that strengthened its argument against Saddam. It
was against the background of those assertions that the U.S. invaded
Iraq and continues to hold it under occupation.

However, the weapons of mass destruction have yet to be found. Now
there is serious doubt if they ever existed from the start. Maybe
some will yet be found. Until they are found, any reasonable media
consumer should doubt American motives for the invasion of Iraq and
suspect they have fallen victim to the use of lies or errors to shape
their opinion. After all, the war was only a means to discover the
weapons of mass destruction. True, there's no need to be too much of
a bleeding heart liberal. But the truth should be demanded - and
right now, it is being blurred.

The images of the humiliated Saddam were another and most significant
building block in the changing dynamic of the public relations
campaign of this war. It is a form of brainwashing. The pictures were
broadcast non-stop, innumerable times. They sent the message to the
planet's residents that the goal of the war was not the discovery of
weapons of mass destruction but the capture and humiliation of Saddam
Hussein.

Saddam, to use the language of the American media, is the "Bad Guy."
America, according to that same lexicon is a nation of Good Guys. The
good won. That's all that matters. Nothing else is important.
Americans should hate Saddam Hussein even though no weapons of mass
destruction were found. The pictures emanating from the screens are
accompanied by implied imperative from commentators: hate, hate, hate.

A critical consumer of the media should be worried, uncomfortable.
The hypnotic images aren't fading from the screen and they present
the public with its enemy, a kind of devil, even though the declared
casus belli has disintegrated, or regrettably, is very shaky.
Moreover, the images are the message. The images are the victory. The
hunt inside the mouth of the deposed tyrant, the search through his
hair for lice, his own neglected and battered image, his general
pitiable state, the sheer defeat of the enemy of the American nation -
 Orwell envisioned it all in "1984."

That's what happened to the saboteur Winston Smith; that's how the
dissident Goldstein looked when his image was broadcast on the huge
screens. The message was that it is impossible to escape the long and
determined arm of the empire and that Saddam's body, even his body,
was occupied. He did not swallow cyanide, didn't shoot himself and
didn't fire at the soldiers. The Americans wanted him alive to show
him off to the world, on the TV screens, and prove, as in "1984,"
that they broke his spirit, defeated his resistance. The dead Winston
Smith was useless to the oppressive regime depicted in Orwell's
novel. A live Winston Smith, his spirit broken, was the great
victory, to be shown and feared.

l "Shock and Awe" was the name given to the American military
campaign against Iraq. But the impact of all the advanced bombs that
were dropped on Baghdad pales in comparison to the shock and awe of
the images of Saddam. Once again it was made evident that the media
front, which shapes public opinion, particularly through TV, has the
greatest impact. It makes one forget the bleak and cloudy Iraqi
future under an American occupation with no end in sight. It erases
from the consciousness information about the bodies of American
soldiers who are dying in a war that was officially justified by a
reason that has evaporated. It sears the consciousness of the viewers
with visual images saturated with symbolism that fan the flames of
feelings. It reduces everything to the simplistic matter of "good"
and "bad," "victory" and "defeat." It makes the American governor in
Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, speak like a copywriter in an advertising
agency or an astronaut landing on the moon equipped with a finely
honed slogan ready to be written into the chronicles of mankind.

As a result of the images, the humiliation of Saddam appears to be a
goal unto itself. Ridiculously, it now justifies the entire war
effort, even though if Secretary of State Colin Powell had gone to
the UN Security Council to claim that America must invade Iraq to
turn Saddam into a homeless man, public opinion would have been
shocked and outraged. There is no evading the feeling that the well-
oiled propaganda machinery managed in this case to rewrite history
and that public opinion has bought it. Fortunately, Saddam really is
a bastard. But such passive public opinion is a horrifying sight to
behold.
 

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Received on Wed Dec 17 20:47:12 2003